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‘Have Your Cake and Eat It Too’

In my previous reader response, I mentioned the puzzling proverb “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Matthew Parry writes: “I’d always found ‘have your cake and eat it too’ perplexing, too, until it was pointed out the reversed construction makes sense: ‘You can’t eat your cake and have it too.’ Of course, everyone thinks I’m misquoting when I say this now!”

The version of the proverb with “eat your cake” followed by “having it” does make more sense to many people, and that is in fact how it was first formulated in English. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs quotes a 1546 compendium by John Heywood, “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” In his Yale Book of Quotations, Fred Shapiro supplies a more typical phrasing from John Davies in 1611: “A man cannot eat his cake and haue it stil.”

The point of the aphorism is that sometimes you have to make a choice between two options that cannot be reconciled. In Russian, you’d say, “You can’t sit on two chairs,” and in German, “You can’t dance at two weddings.” (Yiddish borrows the German saying and tartly adds “...with one tuchis.”)

By the time Jonathan Swift was writing his great parodies, the “cake” proverb must have already seemed rather musty, because he puts in the mouth of one of the fatuous characters in his 1738 farce, “Polite Conversation”: “She cannot eat her cake and have her cake,” says Lady Answerall. Swift’s satirical dialogue is jam-packed with hoary clichés, along with words that he considered silly and faddish. (He jeered at abbreviated forms like phiz for physiognomy, rep for reputation, and mob for the Latin phrase mobile vulgus.)

After Swift’s death, “Polite Conversation” was adapted (a nice way to say “plagiarized”) by one “Timothy Fribble” under the title “Tittle Tattle” in 1749. But a funny thing happened to the “cake” line this time around. The two verb phrases got flipped, resulting in “She cannot have her cake and eat her cake.” This ordering, with the “having” preceding the “eating,” made steady headway over the 19th and 20th centuries. Google’s handy Ngram Viewer shows that around 1940, “have/eat” began to outpace “eat/have,” and since then the upstart has left the original version in the dust.

Not everyone has warmed up to this historical development. Most notoriously, a young Theodore J. Kaczynski learned from his mother that “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” was the correct way to say it. When Kaczynski later penned an anarchist manifesto in the guise of the Unabomber, the appearance of that particular turn of phrase helped F.B.I. analysts, working with Kaczynski’s brother David, identify who the author was and bring him to justice for his mail-bombing spree.

Despite what Mrs. Kaczynski and other sticklers say, it’s possible to make sense of “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” True, the traditional “eat/have” ordering is the only reasonable one if you take the conjunction “and” joining the verb phrases to imply a chronological sequence of events — you can’t eat cake and then still expect to maintain possession over it (except in digested form). But the word “and” doesn’t necessarily have to work that way. It can instead suggest that the two activities of having and eating cake cannot occur simultaneously. Under that reading, it doesn’t matter whether the “eating” or the “having” appears first in the saying. And since a return to the predominance of the “eat/have” version is a lost cause at this point, there’s no point in insisting on it, unless you enjoy making your friends’ eyebrows crinkle.